Kate Ringo Suzuki, our plucky editor-at-large in New York, has graciously agreed to recount a very painful experience for us: the overtweezing of the eyebrows. Ladies, I hope that you will take Kate at her word and put down those pluckers today! After all, Julia Restoin-Roitfeld frequently states that the best advice she has received from her mother is not to pluck her eyebrows... and if Carine need not tweeze, we need not tweeze...
Roitfeld Beauty Secret: No Plucking
By Kate Ringo Suzuki
I'm on a quest for “Carine” eyebrows and I’m failing. I want full, lush, irreverently sexy eyebrows, the kind of eyebrows that hint at spirited, wild, and untamed youthfulness. Instead my eyebrows are disappointingly American. I blame Sassy magazine and their damned eyebrow plucking tutorials. There is a whole generation of American women who can be correctly identified as former Sassy aficionados simply by noting the significant span that exists between their eyebrows. These days the beauty editors at Glamour and Allure are savvy enough to send their readers off for professional eyebrow shaping, but back in the early Nineties it was all about do-it-yourself eyebrows. The idea was to run a pencil vertically by your nose and pluck anything beyond the pencil’s width — except that most girls got a little confused and plucked exactly where the pencil rested on the eyebrow. OOPS!
Did you know that sometimes — horror of horrors! — eyebrows refuse to grow back? Years may pass without picking up a tweezer and yet the eyebrows stay their plucked selves. The eyebrow lady you visit will tell you to faithfully smear castor oil on overplucked areas to stimulate growth but she is full of it. That does not work. Maybe there is a placebo effect on a very select few women who are highly suggestible types, but I’m not one of them. The only remedy for overplucked brows is to pray that they grow back, but since I’m an atheist that doesn’t work for me. I’m considering agnostic: “Please God, I might believe in you if you would help me grow some irreverently sexy ‘Carine’ eyebrows.”
Anyway, in the event that your overplucked eyebrows do not grow back, you must do emergency damage control. The emergency damage control involves booking an eyebrow shaping appointment on Madison Avenue in New York City with the queen of eyebrow shaping, the one and only Ms.
Eliza Petrescu. She will charge you an arm and a leg but if you are eyebrow deficient it will be worth every penny. She is charming and kind as well as talented. She will suggest you not pick up a tweezer and when you explain to her that your brows stopped growing years ago, she will gently nod and get on with her work. She will wax, then pluck. You will wonder if you will have anything left at the end. She will use an eyebrow pencil with the lightest touch. And when you look in the mirror, you will, like magic, have pretty, somehow thicker, fuller-looking eyebrows! Not quite “Carine” brows, but an improvement!
Words of wisdom: Step away. Step away from the tweezers! And pray.
No plucking image by Kellina de Boer. Carine Roitfeld photographs courtesy of guardian.co.uk, Fashion Spot, Getty Images.